RUSSELL’S RESERVE SINGLE BARREL RYE
Batch LL/HH271516 (August 27, 2019)MASH BILL – 51% rye, 37% corn, 12% malted barley
PROOF – 104
AGE – NAS
DISTILLERY – Wild Turkey
PRICE – $63
WORTH BUYING? – W’ll yeah!
Uncorked and tasted in The Year of No Buying (The what? 🔗 here.)
Russell’s Reserve Single Barrel Rye is a whiskey I consider a perennial fave. I recommend it to people all the time. But it’s been a while since I’ve had it. When that happens with a fave, it can be good to check in and see if your palate for it has shifted with time.
The last bottle of Russell’s SiB Rye I enjoyed was back in November 2019. That bottle was from 2016, and I put it up against the 2019 Master’s Keep release, the Cornerstone Rye. The Russell’s held its own!
The current bottle I have open is from 2019. Is the year relevant? Only if you’re a Wild Turkey batch hound in search of the best of their always good batches. (I’ll admit to being at least a bit of a batch hound. 😉)
So how is it? Let’s dive right in.
Here we are, three weeks after uncorking and over a third of the way into the bottle. These brief notes were taken using both Canadian and traditional Glencairns.
COLOR – honey, orange, and amber
NOSE – dry rye and oak spice, a dash of finely ground black pepper, lemon zest, a layer of thick caramel floating in the background, graham cracker
TASTE – the caramel is stronger here, and syrupy, with a subtle orchard fruit compote note, the rye and oak spice, the black pepper
FINISH – gently warm, the orchard fruit compote and caramel lingering
OVERALL – a super solid rye, both sweet and dry at once
This is good. It’s more relaxed than to be spectacular. There’s an effortlessness about it. Kind of the way Jimmy and Eddie Russell sound when they talk about whiskey—calm, confident, congenial, matter of fact, and good humored. No fireworks. Just a well balanced, tasty whiskey.
At the price I paid, this is a no brainer. At today’s more common $70 to $80, it’s also a good buy for a quality rye. Like me, you’ll have paid more for lesser whiskeys than this. So why do that?
Wild Turkey uses the minimum quotient of rye grain to qualify as rye whiskey. This allows the corn to show its sweetness. But rye has much more overt personality than corn. And so whereas a high-rye bourbon might be mistaken at first sip for a rye (District Made’s BiB for example), low-rye / high-corn rye whiskey is still most definitely a rye. This Russell’s Reserve doesn’t get into the various earthy stone notes that a 95% rye like MGP’s can do. Here the balance between sweet and dry is perfectly pitched.
And I can see how this might be considered a fault. When a whiskey around this price doesn’t grab your attention, but patiently accommodates it, anyone expecting a show for their money might be disappointed. None of the individual notes jump out to take center stage. That’s not the Wild Turkey way. Here the attraction is a chorus in balanced harmony.
Russell’s Reserve SiB Rye definitely remains on my perennial faves list. If Campari, which owns Wild Turkey, jacks up the price like they’ve been doing with various Russell’s Reserve bourbon releases, that might change. But for now, this is a high-end shelf staple for sure.
Cheers!
The Right Spirit 